


You & Me & Me

by ThrillingDetectiveTales



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: M/M, Polyamory, Threesome
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:47:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24085339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThrillingDetectiveTales/pseuds/ThrillingDetectiveTales
Summary: The two of them ending up together was a comforting thought when they were saying what were supposed to be their final goodbyes—maybe wewillsee each other again; maybe wecouldmake this work if we gave it a shot—but in the triumphant glare of day Monica knows better.There will be no bittersweet romance with Richard Hendricks, there will be no polite dalliance with Jared Dunn, and there will certainly be no negotiating something with considerably more moving parts between the three of them together.
Relationships: Jared Dunn/Monica Hall/Richard Hendricks
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6





	You & Me & Me

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally watched this show for the first time the other week and immediately fell in love. Naturally my first impulse was to browse the fic and dig up the kink meme, which provided me with this little gem: 
> 
> [“ Any plot, although Jared and Monica gently persuading Richard this is okay would be great - the top photo in this post just made me suddenly really want them as an OT3:](https://siliconvalleykink.dreamwidth.org/1066.html)
> 
> [http://iampiedpiper.tumblr.com/post/129788198799”](http://iampiedpiper.tumblr.com/post/129788198799)
> 
> This is largely an excuse to play with character voice and eventually write a threesome scene, probably with a decent side portion of gay panic because I’m me. Mostly I wanted to write Monica and Jared scheming to get Richard into bed together. While I do my best to edit as I go, I don’t yet have a beta reader in this fandom so please let me know if any glaring errors.
> 
> I’m anticipating this will be three, maaaaybe four chapters long and plan to update on Fridays for the next fee weeks. I’m pretty shit at sticking to a deadline though and time is meaningless nowadays so fair warning that it may not go down that way.
> 
> In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what I’ve got so far! Picks up just after S1E8, “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency.”

Monica doesn’t start thinking about it until TechCrunch Disrupt, when Jared has a semi-public meltdown that casts a long enough shadow over Richard’s sexuality to solve his problems with the prim, sour-faced ex that’s been throwing a wrench into the works all weekend. It’s not the kind of idea Monica would usually entertain, not seriously, but even through the ups and downs of Richard revolutionizing the entire tech industry (and royally fucking Gavin Belson right in his smug little pucker) over the space of a single, desperate evening, she can’t quite shake it.

She isn’t sure why that is. She’s had threesomes before—ill-advised and often fueled by dubious amounts of controlled or outright illegal substances, with partners whose sexual confidence greatly outclasses both the fumbling attempts at flirtation she’s seen from Richard and Jared’s overeager charm. Most of them were underwhelming.

She thinks about it on the drive back to Palo Alto and halfway into her second celebratory cigarette, she concedes that Richard has always had a peculiar and unexpected sort of magnetism about him that might be screwing up an algorithm of her own design. The fuckability quotient—as Monica refers to it in the privacy of her mind and occasionally at a disrespectful public volume over drinks with friends—isn’t an exact science but it’s served her well in the past, helping her to determine which sexual assignations are worth the risk and investment and which are better off ignored. On paper, this should be an easy pass.

The kind of passionate ingenuity that Richard brings to the table is career-making in this industry, legacy-defining, and Monica would be an idiot of the highest order to sleep with the goose before it lays its golden egg. Not to mention the sheer amount of effort that would be involved in facilitating the whole thing.

Monica is pretty sure that she and Jared have come to an understanding. She couldn’t begin to guess at what goes on in that worryingly optimistic, ruthlessly competent, surprisingly dark mind of his but she flatters herself to assume that she’s been recategorized from just another barrier between Jared himself and Richard’s understated affections to something else. A friend, maybe, or at the very least a professional colleague who legitimately has Richard’s best interests at heart, which might be the better of the two by Jared’s metrics. 

Not that it means Jared would have any interest in sleeping with her, even if she sweetened the pot by promising Richard’s involvement, which would undoubtedly be the more difficult of the two to secure. 

Richard is just as weird about Jared as Jared is about him, in his own quiet, selfish way, but he would probably take off running if Monica so much as insinuated that he might be interested in fucking another guy unless she approached the topic from the right angle. He’s the kind of skittish introvert who was bullied out of doing any sexual soul-searching during his formative years and the aggressively heteronormative subculture of ”Big Tech” hasn’t done him any favors on that front. It’s sad, but hardly a unique experience in this industry, and Monica is here to protect Raviga’s interests and Peter Gregory’s good name, not to introduce Richard to the Kinsey scale or sherpa him to bisexual enlightenment.

That’s what college is supposed to be for. It’s not her fault that Richard dropped out before he got that far.

She takes a final drag off her cigarette and sighs a stream of smoke out the open window, flicking the butt away to streak against the blacktop in a receding cluster of sparks. 

It wouldn’t be such a big deal if she didn’t _like_ Richard so much or believe so strongly in the contribution he’s making to the field. Pied Piper was already impressive when Peter sniped it out from under Gavin Belson’s nose and it’s only gotten better since then, thanks in no small part to Richard’s unique brand of sweaty-palmed genius. Monica appreciates that about him, and she sees her own awe and enthusiasm reflected and magnified to a dizzying degree in Jared. It’s hard to watch him sometimes, caught in the intractable pull of his own affection for Richard, but Monica can’t deny that there’s something seductive about the idea of stepping into that gravity and getting a taste of it for herself. 

She bites her lip and shivers a little, then shakes her hair out, blinking rapidly and clearing her throat. The weather outside is balmy and bright but she reaches over to roll her window up, anyway, against an imaginary chill. It wouldn’t be worth it, she reminds herself sternly, placing both hands on the wheel at a precise ten and two, and not just because these are her business partners. 

Richard and Jared are both the settling down type. They long for meaningful, intimate connection, someone waiting for them at home with the lights on after long days away. Monica tried her hand at that sort of modern American fairytale for as long as she cared to and decided that it wasn’t for her. 

While Jared is far too blinded by the light of Richard’s star to ever run the risk of falling for Monica, she would be remiss to even consider exposing Richard to the possibility. Not that she gives herself enough credit to assume his total ruination at her well-manicured hands, but, despite all his bluster and posturing, Richard feels things deeply and it takes him a while to bounce back when his emotions get the better of him. Who knows how long a failed dalliance could knock him off-course? The two of them ending up together was a comforting thought when they were saying what were supposed to be their final goodbyes—maybe we _will_ see each other again; maybe we _could_ make this work if we gave it a shot—but in the triumphant glare of day Monica knows better.

There will be no bittersweet romance with Richard Hendricks, there will be no polite dalliance with Jared Dunn, and there will certainly be no negotiating something with considerably more moving parts between the three of them together. She’ll gladly take this one for the team—or not take it, really—and pack the idea away, for revisitation only on evenings when her vibrator isn’t enough to get her there. Monica is just fine with that.

Until Russ Hanneman comes along with his strange, buffoonish prescience and sets the gears into motion with three simple words.

***

“‘This guy fucks,’” Richard parrots over a plate of tequila lime enchiladas. He scoffs and shakes his head, swirling his fork in the air to punctuate his point. “About Jared. Can you - I mean, can you believe that? _Jared.”_ He shakes his head again, spearing a piece of tortilla-wrapped chicken smothered in cilantro cream sauce. “It’s like somebody saying I - I - I don’t know, that I run, like, survivalist retreats in the fucking Baylands Nature Preserve every other Saturday.”

“I wondered what you did with your weekends.” Monica smirks and Richard rolls his eyes at her, sighing a reluctant laugh out the corner of his mouth. 

Ordinarily, Monica would put an immediate kibosh on tawdry workplace gossip, having never particularly cared to engage in traditional feminine pastimes, but she and Richard finished their official business before they polished off the appetizers and this thought experiment seems like it could be fun for riling Richard up a little. It requires a balanced hand, but it’s good to trick Richard out of his own head once in a while, and if he’s raging about Jared’s rumored bedroom activity then he’s not stuck in a patented Pied Piper anxiety spiral. 

At the very least, it’s better than spending the next forty minutes fighting glassy-eyed boredom while Richard oscillates between explaining upcoming platform developments in granular technical detail and then apologizing for doing so, ad infinitum. Monica takes a bite of her salad and a sip of cucumber-raspberry kombucha and shrugs, “I don’t know, I can kinda see it.”

“See it?” Richard asks, eyebrows jumping toward his hairline. “See - see what? See Jared? Fucking?”

“Well, yeah.” Monica shrugs again. “He could have game hidden somewhere under all the sweater-vests.” She waves a vague hand at her own chest and can’t help but grin when Richard’s eyes flick down and back up, the tips of his ears flaring pink. Grateful as she is for Pied Piper’s continued success, a part of her will always be a little disappointed that they never got the chance to grab a drink for real.

“You - right, sure,” Richard licks his lip and ducks his head, pushing his food around his plate. “You’re joking. You - you have to be joking, I mean. Jared’s a good guy and, uh, an excellent, excellent biz dev but, come on, Monica, really? He - ha - in what universe does he possibly have the kind of game that would lead to Russ fucking Hanneman announcing repeatedly to the world at large that he fucks?”

Monica rolls her eyes toward the ceiling and sighs through her nose while she chews. 

“Look at it,” she says a second later, “like a - I don’t know, like a list of individual attributes, alright? Separate from the collective that you know as Jared.” She holds out her thumb, and then one subsequent finger for each thought as she explains, “He’s the lead biz dev at a promising tech startup. He tops six feet, he dresses well. Actually gives a shit about personal hygiene.” She laughs in a soft gust and leans in, resting her hands flat against the table. “Do you know how rare a find that is in this industry?”

“No,” Richard says, and then immediately corrects, “I mean, yeah, okay, fine. Tech devs aren’t exactly known for their personal grooming standards, but it’s not that bad, right?” He gestures to himself and adds, “I mean, like, I think I’m doing pretty okay.” 

Monica rolls her eyes and doesn’t bother apologizing. Richard is, admittedly, better than most but she’s seen him on the back-end of a three-day coding stint—marinated in Redbull, with a powder coating of whatever massively processed garbage snack foods Jared has been able to trick him into eating by leaving them within arm’s reach—and the horse he’s trying to climb onto isn’t as high as he thinks it is.

“It would be more impressive if Jared hadn’t done your laundry.” It’s a stab in the dark, but a well-aimed one, if the embarrassed pucker of Richard’s mouth is anything to go by.

Richard draws his shoulders up like he always does when he’s feeling defensive, puffing like a bird and lifting his chin as he chirps, “It’s not my fault he got to it first. I was going to do it, I - I had plans, but, you know if that’s your baseline for what makes a man we could, I don’t know, set you up with a - a Whirlpool or something. I mean, it’s practically got a vibrate setting built-in already. That should cover basically all your bases, right?” He takes a quick, darting bite of his food while Monica stares at him, caught midway between amusement and affront.

She stabs at her salad and points a forkful of lightly dressed spinach in the direction of Richard’s face. “I don’t think insulting each others’ standards for prospective sexual partners is an arms race you want to start, Hendricks.”

“I’m sorry,” Richard says, holding his hands up, palms splayed out. “I’m sorry, I just - you’re telling me that you, Monica. _You_ would willingly have sex with Jared Dunn?”

Monica does him the credit of actually taking the time to consider her answer, though the look she flashes across the table while she’s thinking is designed to convey the full breadth of her irritation at his stubborn disbelief. “If the circumstances were right,” she says eventually, with as much dignity as she can muster, “yes. Yes, I would.”

“Why?” Richard asks, incredulous, around a bitter, gusted noise that might have been a laugh in a previous life. His eyes are wide and blue, brow furrowed over a smile that’s well on its way to a grimace. “I mean, you know what he’s like! He’s - he’s just _there,_ all the time! Hovering! Like some kind of - of skeleton butler. Possessed by the ghost of a vengeful tiger mom. What woman wants that?”

“Right,” Monica agrees, flattening her mouth into an unimpressed line. “What woman wants an emotionally available man who listens to her, and worries about her, and makes sincere efforts to anticipate her needs and desires all while prioritizing her career over his own? That would be crazy.”

“Oh, come on,” Richard scoffs. The tips of his ears have gone pink again. He shakes his head and pushes his enchiladas around on his plate so hard the fork squeaks against the ceramic. “If I tried half the shit that Jared does with me on a woman, I would get slapped with a restraining order so fast it would break the sound barrier.”

Monica lifts on shoulder in a shrug. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she says, and takes another bite of her salad. “Jared pulls it off.”

“He - I - ” Richard splutters. “It - it’s creepy! And - and plus, you’re like, way out of his league!”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Richard shrugs but doesn’t look up, just continues deconstructing his meal into a mess of mashed tortilla and filling and golden Spanish rice. “You know, you’re like a ten and Jared is a - I don’t know, a four.”

“Wow, Richard,” Monica drawls, lip curling a little. “If this is how you talk about the guy who turned his back on an upper management position at one of the biggest, most far-reaching tech companies in the industry to come work for you out of some stoner’s garage, I’d hate to hear what you say about me when I’m not around.”

Richard continues shaping his food into a tidy little pile, chin jutting forward slightly as he says in a somewhat meeker tone, “Um, technically we work out of a stoner’s living room, so - ”

“Yeah,” Monica interjects, doing that thing she knows Richard hates where the word sounds like it starts with ‘ch.’ “With a bonafide uggo, apparently.”

“That’s not - ” Richard starts, and then sighs and pinches at the bridge of his nose. He glares at Monica and leans in, resting a hand against his chest as he corrects, “He’s - look I’m not saying he’s like, hideous or anything. In certain circles he probably has - um. An allure, or whatever. Might even be considered, like, cute, or something. Like a - a one-eyed puppy, or one of those birds that gets caught in an oil spill, but by, you know. By the metrics of the standard ten number system, nobody on the Pied Piper team is cracking a five, alright? Let’s not lie to ourselves, okay? We’re not the most conventionally attractive bunch and - and that’s fine, but pretending otherwise would be, just, delusional. Just totally delusional. Jared included.”

“I think he’s hot,” Monica protests, half truth and half obstinance.

“Hot?” Richard echoes, sounding strangled. He blinks several times in rapid succession. “I’m - I’m sorry, but - uh - we, ha - we are talking about the same Jared Dunn, right? Monica, the man once described _himself_ ‘an anthropomorphized loaf of unleavened white bread.’”

Monica shrugs again. “Humility can be a pretty big turn on. Especially in this town.” She takes another bite of her salad. “Besides, I tend to find that ‘conventionally attractive’ men,” she adds, using her fingers as quotation marks in the air, “make for boring, unoriginal sex.”

“And you think _Jared_ is out there shaking up the status quo?” He laughs, a sharp, desperate sort of sound, and his shoulders climb up toward his ears as he shakes his head and mutters, “Yeah. Ha. Get real, Kevin Bacon, this isn’t Dirty Dancing.”

Monica frowns a little at the mismatched—and frankly lukewarm—80s romance cinema burn but recovers quickly, picking up her beverage and tilting the glass in a lazy swirl so the ice tinkles against the sides. “I think that if he’s putting off big enough dick energy that Russ Hanneman sat up and took notice, I’d be willing to risk it.”

“I - fine. Yeah, okay. Sure. Sure, yeah.” Richard pushes his chair out from the table, hard enough that it rattles a little. That pink flush is bleeding up his throat and spilling across the bridge of his nose.

Monica can feel her eyebrows drifting upwards, mystified by this sharp turn into full on tantrum territory.

“Jared Dunn,” he continues, rising slowly to his feet, “who, by the way, wakes me up every fucking night screaming nonsense in German. _Jared Dunn_ is some kind of unassuming sex god and everyone has just been too blind to notice it past the - the glare of his complexion until now.” 

“I think you’re being a little uncharitable - ” Monica starts, but Richard cuts her off, throwing his arms up in the air.

“I’m being uncharitable!” he echoes, around a laugh that’s edging toward hysterical. “I’m - no.” He cuts a hand through the air and shakes his head, pressing his lips into a narrow line. He huffs a breath through his nose and cracks a smile, but it’s thin and brittle, on the edge of shattering. “You know what? You’re right. I am. I’m being fucking uncharitable. Jared is tall and great and perfect and he has hot lips and a tight ass and a - a hog as big as my fucking arm!” He slaps a hand to his forearm while a scandalized family of four in a nearby booth stare at him, wide-eyed.

Monica mouths, “Sorry,” at them but Richard doesn’t seem to notice, stirred to too high a boil to care.

“I wish you both every fucking happiness in your slutty, kinky future together! May you have hordes of slutty, kinky babies and may the - the lube never run dry!” He effects a mocking little bow, complete with a condescending twirl of his hand, and wheels around, probably to storm for the bathroom if the set of his shoulders—and the unconscionable amount of cilantro in his meal—is any indication, but he catches his foot on one of the table’s cast-iron legs and nearly goes down. He rescues himself from meeting the tasteful mixed wood floor face first with a graceless lurch and no small amount of luck. By some miracle, nothing on the table spills aside from Richard’s water, which slops in a wave over the lip of his glass and soaks the thoroughly dismantled remnants of his lunch.

“I’m alright!” Richard yelps. “I’m alright.” His whole face is red now. He smooths down the front of his hoodie, nods, tight and stilted, at the family—who are glued to the scene like it’s some piece of perverted but exceptionally well-performed dinner theatre—and flashes Monica a dark, embarrassed look before making his retreat.

 _Well,_ Monica thinks to herself, _that was interesting._

She makes eye contact with the mother at the other table and says, “I’m so sorry you had to hear that.” She considers comping their meal for a second, as an apology for subjecting their children to one of Richard’s spectacles, but then the woman shakes her head and conspicuously crosses herself while muttering an unsubtle Lord’s Prayer under her breath. Monica decides she doesn’t give a shit about whatever trauma Richard may have just inflicted and flags the waiter down to take care of the bill for their own table, instead.

Richard reappears eventually, pale and subdued and sweaty at his hairline, like he always gets after a vigorous round of projectile vomiting. He slides into his seat, sheepish and meek with his shoulders hunched, and clears his throat, soft and unassuming. “I’m - uh. I’m sorry. About all that. It was - ” He stops, frowns, and shakes his head. “I don’t know what it was, but it was definitely - uh. Definitely not me. Or like, not the guy I’m, y’know, trying to be, or whatever. Can I - is there anything I can do to, uh. You know, get you to, uh. To forgive me, or. Or, yeah.” He winces at the end like he’s in physical pain, which is about as good an indicator as any that he’s being sincere.

Monica makes a show of thinking this proposition over. She folds her hands together with her elbows on the table, index fingers pointed straight up like the barrel of a gun, and her chin tucked into the curve of her thumbs. She thinks she knows what that was all about, but this is absolutely not the time or place to float the theory that Richard was having a big gay panic about the guy who is functionally his best friend, nowadays. Instead, she hums, long and low, and says slowly, “As much fun as it would be to extort you for all you’re worth, let’s say you pick up the tab next time and we’ll call it even.”

The small, nervous line of Richard’s mouth flickers up at the corners. “That, uh. That sounds more than fair,” he agrees, gratitude radiating out from him as relief bleeds the tension from his posture. “Some might even go so far as to call it generous.”

“I’m gonna pick somewhere nice,” Monica warns. “One of those places that charges two weeks’ rent for a plate of flavored foam on a sad cracker.”

“I think I probably deserve that,” Richard nods.

They make it to the car without further histrionics and their conversation on the drive back to Erlich’s terrible hovel stays firmly rooted in under-appreciated bands from the 90s. Monica drops Richard at the curb without incident and he ducks his head in through the open door and says, “Sorry again, for. You know.”

He shrugs and Monica snorts.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says, digging her pack of American Spirits out of her purse. “It didn’t even make the top ten for restaurant meltdowns I’ve seen from VCs.”

Richard flashes her a small, grateful grin. “Right,” he nods. “Well, I’ll, uh. Catch you later.”

He closes the door and takes off at a jog up the drive. Jared has the front door open for him before he’s even halfway there.

Monica slips her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose and peers over the top of them, giving Jared a thoughtful once over. He’s in a soft cashmere sweater in a burnt shade of mustard yellow, the crisp collar of a white shirt peeking over the V-neck, and a pair of slate grey slacks, with his hair neatly parted as usual. His eyes are so blue Monica can make out the color even from here. He waves when he catches her looking, an easy lift of his arm accompanied by a smile, all teeth and surprised pleasure at being noticed. Monica returns both gestures on instinct, though she has the decency to keep her mouth closed, at least.

He’s a little goofy, she thinks as she peels away, but yeah. She would hit it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I’m on Tumblr and Dreamwidth as @thrillingdetectivetales if you’d like to talk SV or any of my thousand other fandoms~


End file.
